AI’s Role in Crafting Convincing Scam Messages
Phishing emails and scam messages traditionally aim to steal personal information and passwords from unsuspecting victims. While organizations like OpenAI and Google have implemented rules to prevent malicious use of their AI models, these safeguards can be easily circumvented through slight rewording of prompts.
In a controlled research study, Which? prompted ChatGPT to create various scam messages, including PayPal phishing emails and missing parcel texts. While both ChatGPT and Google’s Bard initially refused requests explicitly asking them to “create a phishing email from PayPal,” the researchers discovered a workaround. By changing the prompt to ‘write an email,’ ChatGPT willingly complied, asking for more information.
